How the numbers on this site are calculated
Every dollar figure on a salary or hourly page comes out of one calculation, run in code, from published federal data. This page is that calculation written out, including the parts it leaves out.
The order of operations
Start with a gross annual salary. Subtract federal income tax, then FICA, then state income tax, then any mandatory state payroll tax. What's left is take-home pay. Divide take-home pay by the local price level and you get real value: what that money buys compared with an average-priced part of the country.
Nothing in that chain is estimated from a rule of thumb. There's no flat "assume 30% goes to taxes" step anywhere, and no blended effective rate standing in for a bracket schedule.
1. Federal income tax
The standard deduction comes off gross first: $16,100 for a single filer, $32,200 filing jointly. What remains runs through the 2026 brackets, one slice at a time. Rates are marginal, so a salary that reaches the 24% bracket doesn't pay 24% on all of it.
| Taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| $0 to $12,400 | 10% |
| $12,400 to $50,400 | 12% |
| $50,400 to $105,700 | 22% |
| $105,700 to $201,775 | 24% |
| $201,775 to $256,225 | 32% |
| $256,225 to $640,600 | 35% |
| $640,600 and above | 37% |
| Taxable income | Rate |
|---|---|
| $0 to $24,800 | 10% |
| $24,800 to $100,800 | 12% |
| $100,800 to $211,400 | 22% |
| $211,400 to $403,550 | 24% |
| $403,550 to $512,450 | 32% |
| $512,450 to $768,700 | 35% |
| $768,700 and above | 37% |
These figures come from the IRS revenue procedure that sets the 2026 inflation adjustments. They aren't projections.
2. FICA
FICA is calculated on gross wages, not on taxable income, so the standard deduction doesn't reduce it. Three components:
| Component | Rate | Applies to |
|---|---|---|
| Social Security | 6.2% | the first $184,500 of wages, then nothing |
| Medicare | 1.45% | all wages, no cap |
| Additional Medicare | 0.9% | wages above $200,000 single, or $250,000 filing jointly |
The Social Security wage base is the reason a $200,000 salary keeps a larger share of each extra dollar than a $150,000 one does, which partly offsets the higher income-tax bracket. The additional Medicare rate has no employer match and no cap, so it stacks on top of the regular 1.45% rather than replacing it.
Only the employee side is subtracted. Your employer pays a matching Social Security and Medicare contribution that never appears on your payslip, and it isn't counted here.
3. State income tax
48 of the 51 jurisdictions covered, meaning the 50 states plus the District of Columbia, carry a full 2026 schedule: brackets or a flat rate, plus the standard deduction and personal exemption combined into a single subtraction. Nine states levy no income tax on wages at all, and the calculation returns zero for those rather than substituting a national average.
Some states phase their deduction out as income rises. Maine, Maryland, Ohio, South Carolina and Wisconsin all do, and each of those phase-outs is modelled as a function of gross income rather than as a flat number. Colorado starts from federal taxable income, so applying a second deduction there would double-count the federal one. Pennsylvania has neither a standard deduction nor a personal exemption, so its flat rate applies to the whole wage.
State brackets used here are single-filer schedules. Most states roughly double their bracket widths for joint filers, so a joint figure computed off single brackets would overstate the tax. Rather than print a number that runs high, joint figures on this site stay federal only.
4. Mandatory state payroll taxes
These aren't income tax and they aren't FICA, but they leave the paycheck the same way, so leaving them out understates what actually goes. Three states have confirmed 2026 employee rates:
| State | Program | Rate | Cap |
|---|---|---|---|
| CA | CA disability insurance (SDI) | 1.300% | none, applies to all wages |
| NY | NY paid family leave | 0.432% | $411.91 a year |
| NY | NY disability benefits | 0.500% | $31.20 a year |
| NJ | NJ family leave insurance | 0.230% | applies to the first $171,100 of wages |
California is the one that changes an answer. Its disability insurance contribution runs on all wages with no cap at all, which is $1,300 on a $100,000 salary, more than several states take in income tax altogether. Every California figure on this site includes it.
5. Real value: dividing by the price level
Take-home pay is only half the question. The other half is what a dollar buys where you spend it, and the federal government measures exactly that. The Bureau of Economic Analysis publishes Regional Price Parities, an index where 100 is the national average price level for the same year. A metro at 115 is 15% more expensive than average. A metro at 88 is 12% cheaper.
So real value is take-home pay divided by the index over 100. That division, rather than a subtraction, is the correct operation because RPP is a price ratio, not a dollar cost. If prices are 15% higher, the same money buys 1 / 1.15 as much, which is about 87%, not 85%. Doing it as a percentage subtraction gets the wrong answer, and gets it more wrong the further the metro sits from average.
Two related figures follow from the same index. The salary you'd need in an expensive metro to match a national-average lifestyle is gross times the index. The annual cost of the price premium is the gap between take-home pay and real value.
Worked example
A $100,000 salary, single filer, in Chicago, where the 2024 all-items price level is 103.6.
| Gross salary | $100,000 |
| Federal income tax | -$13,170 |
| FICA | -$7,650 |
| Illinois income tax | -$4,805 |
| Take-home pay | $74,375 |
| Divided by 1.036 | $71,790 |
That last line is the number these pages exist to produce. $74,375 of take-home pay in Chicago goes as far as $71,790 would in an average-priced part of the country. The effective state rate here is 4.8%, and the price premium costs $2,584 a year against a metro sitting at 100.
What the price index does and doesn't measure
RPP is spatial, not temporal. It compares a metro against the country in the same year. A metro whose line rises across the chart on a salary page got expensive relative to everywhere else, which is not the same thing as prices going up. During a high-inflation year a metro can fall on that chart while its actual prices climb. No page on this site calls that trend inflation, because it isn't.
The all-items index also hides most of what a reader needs, so the category breakdown sits alongside it on every metro page. BEA publishes price levels for four groups:
| Category | Covers |
|---|---|
| Rent and housing | rent, and the equivalent cost of owning |
| Groceries and goods | food, clothing, fuel, household things |
| Utilities | electricity and gas |
| Everything else | eating out, haircuts, childcare, healthcare, getting around |
Seattle sits about 11% above the national average on all items. Its goods are near 104 and its housing is above 150. Someone weighing a move needs to know that the premium is almost entirely rent, because that changes what they can do about it.
Rent figures
Rent comes from HUD Fair Market Rents for fiscal year 2026. An FMR is the 40th-percentile gross rent, meaning rent plus essential utilities, for a standard-quality unit in the area. It isn't an average, isn't a median, and isn't what listings ask. It sits below typical asking rent by design.
Several metros are split by HUD into sub-areas that don't match BEA's metro boundaries. Seattle splits into Seattle-Bellevue and Tacoma; New York splits into seven. Where that happens, the sub-area containing the principal city is used and HUD's own name for it is printed on the page, so a Seattle-Bellevue figure is never attributed to the whole metro without saying so.
What is not modelled
This is the part worth reading closely. The list is long, it's specific, and each item moves the answer in a knowable direction.
Local and city income tax, never included
No local income tax appears in any figure on this site. Not one. For 12 metros where it materially changes the answer, it's disclosed in prose on the page instead:
| Where | What's missing |
|---|---|
| New York City | a resident income tax of roughly 3% to 3.9% |
| Philadelphia | a resident wage tax of about 3.75% |
| Maryland counties | a county income tax, around 3.2% in Baltimore |
| Ohio municipalities | commonly 1.8% to 2.5%, including Cleveland and Columbus |
| Indiana counties | every county levies one, roughly 1% to 3% |
| Detroit | a resident income tax of about 2.4% |
| Louisville | an occupational tax of about 2.2% |
| Kansas City and St. Louis | a 1% earnings tax on residents |
| Portland metro | regional income taxes above certain income levels |
| Pennsylvania municipalities | an earned income tax, about 1% typically |
If you live in one of these places, your real take-home pay is lower than the figure on the page by roughly the local rate applied to your wage.
Credits
No tax credit of any kind is modelled. Not the Earned Income Tax Credit, not the Child Tax Credit, not the Child and Dependent Care Credit, not education credits, not the Saver's Credit, not any state credit. Every one of them would reduce tax and raise take-home pay, so the figures here run high for anyone who claims them. That gap is largest at lower incomes and for households with children, where the EITC and CTC together can be worth several thousand dollars.
Several states deliver their personal exemption as a credit rather than a deduction. Delaware, Nebraska, Iowa, Oregon, Utah, California and Arkansas all do. Those seven read slightly high here for the same reason.
Pre-tax deferrals
Nothing is deferred. No 401(k) or 403(b) contribution, no traditional IRA deduction, no HSA or FSA contribution, no pre-tax health insurance premium, no transit benefit, no dependent care account. All of these reduce federal taxable income, and most reduce state taxable income too. Someone putting the full elective deferral into a traditional 401(k) will owe meaningfully less federal tax than these pages show, and will also take home less cash, because the money went somewhere else. Note that pre-tax retirement contributions don't reduce FICA, so the Social Security and Medicare lines stay where they are.
Itemised deductions
The standard deduction is used everywhere, with no exceptions. Mortgage interest, state and local taxes paid, charitable contributions, large medical expenses: none of it is modelled. Roughly nine in ten filers take the standard deduction, so this is the right default, but it's wrong for anyone who itemises, and it's most wrong for homeowners in high-tax states.
Filing status
Two federal statuses are covered: single, and married filing jointly. Head of household isn't modelled, and it has both a larger standard deduction and wider brackets than single, so a head-of- household filer pays less federal tax than the single figures show. Married filing separately and qualifying surviving spouse aren't covered either. State-level figures are single-filer only, as noted above.
Income type
Wage income only. No self-employment tax, which roughly doubles the FICA line for anyone who owes it. No capital gains, no dividends, no rental income, no retirement distributions, no bonus withholding at supplemental rates. No state-level treatment of retirement income, which several states exempt in whole or in part.
State-level provisions not modelled
| Provision | Where | Effect here |
|---|---|---|
| Deductibility of federal income tax paid | Alabama, Missouri, Oregon | tax reads high |
| Recapture provisions | Connecticut, New York | bite above the salary bands published here |
| Minimum taxes | Vermont | not modelled |
| Personal exemption delivered as a credit | DE, NE, IA, OR, UT, CA, AR | tax reads slightly high |
Employee-funded state programs with unconfirmed rates
11 states run employee-funded paid leave or disability programs whose 2026 employee rates weren't confirmed against a primary source. Rather than invent a rate, the contribution is left out and disclosed: WA, OR, CO, MA, CT, RI, HI, MD, DE, MN, ME. Real take-home pay in those states is a little lower than shown.
Temporary federal deductions
The temporary deductions for tips, overtime and seniors created by the 2025 reconciliation act aren't modelled. They apply to a minority of filers and their 2026 caps weren't confirmed at the time these tables were built.
The verified-state gate
A page on this site is public only when three conditions all hold. The federal figures are verified. The figures for that page's state are verified. And the page's own release date has passed.
The second condition is per state on purpose. When a state's 2026 brackets can't be confirmed against a primary source, that state's pages don't publish. They don't publish with a warning label, and they don't fall back to the previous year's numbers with an asterisk. They return a 404 until the figures are confirmed.
Currently gated: ID, ND, VT. Vermont's revenue department blocks automated fetches, and Idaho and North Dakota publish their bracket widths late in the year. Those states' metros are missing from the salary and hourly sets entirely.
The whole tax layer is re-verified every January. Bracket widths are inflation-indexed, and states cut rates mid-session: five did in 2026, retroactive to January 1, which made even a February reference table wrong for those five.
Rounding
Dollar figures are rounded to the nearest dollar for display and the underlying arithmetic runs unrounded, so a column of displayed numbers can be off by a dollar or two from its displayed total. Where prose would imply false precision, figures are rounded to the nearest hundred instead.
Where the data comes from
Every dataset behind these calculations, with its publisher, its vintage, its licence and a link, is listed on the data sources page. The BEA price data in use is the 2024 vintage, released February 19, 2026. When any of it changes, the change gets dated on the updates page.